The excitement was palpable.  I was going to be doing something I hadn’t done since March of 2020.  It’s not like I was crazy about doing it then, but you know how it is – when something is taken away, you want to get it back, even if it wasn’t your favorite thing to do.  

So yes, it was with excitement that I donned my mask and went through the automatic door and entered…the grocery store.  Ok, maybe not a big deal to you, but Doug has literally been doing all the grocery shopping since last year. Not that he didn’t do it before, but sometimes we would have a mini-date through the frozen food section and I would buy a few things that he would forget, and it would just be a sweet little moment – in more ways than one. 

Grocery shopping is on one hand extremely boring and on the other hand addictive.  In the early days of our marriage, we were counting pennies (literally) and created menus so we knew exactly what we had to buy.  There was no shopping just because something looked good or seemed a guilty pleasure.  So here again, I was getting ready to step into a world I hadn’t seen in some time and, well, it was a little exciting.

We walked through the door and immediately my eyes were scanning the shelves – what do I want?  What do I need?  Ooo!  Flowers.  Doug went one direction and I went another.  So I looked at flowers and got distracted by the fruit.  What do I want?  The deli smells great!  Everything was so distracting.  I hadn’t had this kind of distraction in a long time.  Doug on the other hand was on a mission.  This is the way he shops.  He has a list, he goes directly to those things on his list and he gets out of there.  I on the other hand, need to go up and down each aisle because being the visual person I am, I need to see everything to remember what I need.

I’m sure you can already see the conflict and I was very aware that Doug was used to doing the grocery shopping his way for quite a while and I wanted to make sure I didn’t make him crazy.  So, if I wanted to go up the next aisle, I would leave him looking for whatever was on his list and pick up what I wanted.  We’ll be having dump cake later this week.  Not on the list, but it just sounded good.

While there are always people who tend block aisles, this one was funny – I’ll call her “the potato chip lady”.  I watched her from the meat counter because with her cart placed diagonally across the front of the aisle where I wanted to go, she blocked anyone from going up or down, picking up bags of potato chips, reading the fine print, setting them in the cart, taking them out and reading them again.  For a LONG time.  Or the three friends at another end who obviously hadn’t seen each other in a long time, taking turns hugging each other, masks over their mouths but not their noses, laughing and enjoying each other’s company but none having ANY idea that someone was trying to get through.  It’s hard to social distance when this kind of thing is happening, you know?

This was early afternoon on a Friday and my assumption was that there wouldn’t a lot of people in the store.  I was wrong.  Friday is obviously old people day at the store.  Slow old people, grumpy old people, oblivious old people, old people who will run you over with their cart because YOU’RE too slow for them.  It was hard to anticipate how to behave around them.  At  one point I slowed down to wait on a lady who was very carefully checking out boxes of cereal.  I thought I was just being patient – after all, I really wasn’t in a hurry.  However, the lady coming up behind me wasn’t about to slow down.  If she had been driving a car, she would have sideswiped me.  Never looking anywhere but forward, she was on a mission.  

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Judy, you’re older too.  No, not this old.  But if I behave this way when I’m that old, please, someone say something to me, ok?  Regardless, I spent my grocery time chuckling at all of the many quirky behaviors I observed, while I spent my time thinking, oh I REALLY want to buy some Oreos.  I didn’t .  I was good.

Then it was off to check out and follow my usual, or what HAD been my usual M.O.  and that was buying a copy of my HGTV Magazine.  I looked at the end of every checkout counter.  There were NONE.  I looked at the magazine rack and there were NONE.  Had the pandemic taken away my favorite magazine?  I’m a tad bit bummed.  So, I followed Doug through the checkout counters (he switches if one is going faster than another) behind a lovely lady who was probably my age or younger.  

You know how it is when you’re checking out, right?  You take your cart and shift it over while you’re bagging your groceries so the next person can get through.  She had no clue that anyone was behind her as she slowly and carefully bagged her groceries.  Doug was at the end bagging our groceries and looking at me with raised eyebrows and a smile in his eyes (since you can’t see his mouth with a mask) until she very quietly finished her job and left, allowing me to get through.  At first I was thinking about how clueless she was and then I thought about maybe WHY she was clueless.  Was she distracted by something, and just going through the motions?  Maybe it had been a rough morning.  It was just this kind of interaction with people that I had been missing.  The kind of interaction that gets my mind going in the form of stories.  The kind that makes me wonder what people are thinking, that makes me wonder about their stories.

Staying at home, while the safe thing to do, has kept me from the very fodder I need in order to write.  I miss my kids at school, and the interaction with other educators. So even if it was only a little trip to the grocery store, a long overdue mini-date, it was enough to get the creative juices going, and things are beginning to feel a little bit more normal.